Mozilla Firefox 1.5 Beta 1

This is the first Beta release of the next major Firefox upgrade, which is due to be released sometime later this year. (Not bad considering that 1.0 was launched in November 2004.)

This isn’t the final release of Firefox 1.5, it is the Beta 1 version, still in the development stage and has been made available for testing purposes only. A quick test as to whether you think you should download and install it: if you think you are a geek, then yes. If you have trouble finding how to open a graphics file in Lotus WordPro, then you’d be better sticking with Firefox 1.0.6.

I’m a bit of a geek! So I’ve downloaded and installed Firefox 1.5 Beta 1. I’m impressed with it so far. It feels much faster (but that could also have something to do with my having very few extensions installed). I like the drag-and-drop rearrangement of tabs feature. It supposedly has better support for web standards (always a good thing in my book), and has a new button: “Report Broken Web Site” which reports web sites that are not working in Firefox so that Mozilla can work with their web designers to iron out any problems.

A couple of improvements I would like to see.

I would like the option for new tabs to automatically open with my Home page. This is available as an extension for 1.0.x, but I’d like to see it built in.

I really like the “tab x” extension, which allows you to close tabs quickly by clicking on the ‘x’ that appears in the top-right of each tab. That would make a great built-in feature.

But apart from those, and the fact that most 1.0.x extensions won’t work with 1.5, it’s a pretty good browser.

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Gareth Saunders

I’m Gareth J M Saunders, 46 years old, 6′ 4″, father of 3 boys (including twins).
Latterly, web architect and agile project manager at the University of St Andrews and warden at Agnes Blackadder Hall. Currently on sabbatical.
I am a priest in the Scottish Episcopal Church, and I sing with the NYCGB alumni choir.
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2 thoughts on “Mozilla Firefox 1.5 Beta 1”

That’s true. Having seen how Safari handles RSS feed I’m more than impressed. In the meantime, until someone either incorporates Safari-like features into Firefox as standard, or writes an extension for it, I’ll have to make do with FeedDemon.